


have you tried turning the power off and back on

by londer



Series: d20 alphabet 2021 [5]
Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Backstory, Campaign 03 Season 02: The Unsleeping City Chapter II, Dimension 20 Alphabet, Gen, Hacking, i fucking love maddie so much absolute icon!!, transphobia handled with more grace than it deserves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 01:06:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30131640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/londer/pseuds/londer
Summary: Maddie Park grows up.Day Y for d20alphabet
Series: d20 alphabet 2021 [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2189991
Comments: 5
Kudos: 23
Collections: Dimension 20 Alphabet 2021





	have you tried turning the power off and back on

**Author's Note:**

> Written for day Y: Y / yearbook, Yes!/?, yearning
> 
> this was a wip for a longer piece but idk where i was going with it so here

Maddie's grandmama took one look at her mother's pregnant belly and announced that she'd be having a girl. Mom had laughed because the doctor's office was sure she was having a boy, and Lauren Park is a pharmacy tech and a third-gen American who believes in science above all else. 

Fifteen years later when the truth came tumbling sobbing and snot-faced out of Maddie's scared mouth, her mother had only grumbled about having to tell grandmama that she had been right all along. 

//

The first hacking Maddie did wasn't even really hacking. She stole the post-it note with the admin password from the school secretary's desk and used it to make some... _ edits _ to her school records. Changed her name and added a fake doctor's note to get her out of gym class indefinitely. 

She got caught, obviously, and still had to take gym sophomore year, although her mom raised hell and got the name change to stick. 

What they didn't catch was the second admin account she'd created just for her. Maddie got a little subtler with her manipulations after that. College was an expensive dream for her single mom to be able to afford for her. Maddie was a good student, but her classmates had private SAT tutors and weren't working part-time at the sandwich shop. So she tweaked things. Rounded up grades, a few points here and there. Made sure her schedule always lined up perfectly, a slew of AP and honors courses that left her an eighth period study hall to leave early for work. By junior year she was a shoo-in for top five in her class, and The Good Financial Aid packages were within reach.

//

She learned to properly program junior year in AP Computer Science. The teacher was new and hadn't been there for all the transitioning drama, so Maddie got the delicious new experience of Adult Men Who Think Women Don't Understand Computers. A nightmarish little combination of indignation and bizarre gender euphoria.

Class was boring.  _ Learning _ computer science? Sucks so hard.  _ Doing _ CS? Lots of fun. She sped through the curriculum and spent her free time in class building little websites and games. Portfolio stuff, each showcasing a skill that colleges could look at and go  _ hey yeah this girl knows how to code good and we should give her a full ride _ .

//

She pulls off her first proper hack senior year. That transphobic bitch Amanda Sykes who runs the yearbook committee couldn’t get away with changing Maddie’s name, since those came from admin. What she could do is dredge up every pre or early transition photo of Maddie that hadn’t yet been destroyed and include it in the  _ haha look how awkward we were as middle schoolers and freshmen!  _ section.

Thank god for Claire Wyndham, who cornered her in the library one morning with an unbound proof copy and a pissed glint in her eye. Maddie wouldn’t have ever known before the photos went to print otherwise.

(Maddie checks in with her sometimes, even now almost eight years later. Claire and her girlfriend are super cute and are coparenting a bigass lizard that they knit holiday sweaters for.)

Claire was a frosh and couldn’t do much to stand up to Amanda, but Maddie was perfectly capable of getting around her. One carefully placed buffer exploit and she wiggled her way into the yearbook production company’s website where she could modify the final version before it went to print. She swapped some formatting around to remove any old photos of herself without adding anything new. Some dark corner of her mind sharply considered dredging up some prepubescent photos of Amanda to replace the ones of herself, but her heart won out in the end. No need to stoop to her level. 


End file.
